September 14, 2012

Intel’s xeon phi is what could become a vga card but didn’t. Its pcie card with 56 pentium-class cores and 8 gb of ram.
An interesting thing is that it runs an operating system inside, based on linux kernel.
Long story at semiaccurate

So, anyone wants to try to run a linux kernel on nvidia’s cuda or amd’s gcn ?

see the dot on it, its pin #1
there is few chips that looks similar, but only one is flash spi rom chip, be carefull
2) short pin 4 and pin 5, better to do it with some thin wire, and make sure you didnt short anything else, also make sure you can unshort it when the card is running and dont short anything else doing so.
this trick prevents videocard from sending any command to flash rom chip, and so it cant read content of rom chip
3) now start the computer(obviously you will need the second card to do this), now the card will be visible, with 0000 as subsystem devid and vendor id,
make sure system and flashing app see the card fine
4) now very carefully, while the system is running, cut the wire you used to short 5 and 4 pins
5) flash the card (in case of nvflash use options -5 -6, in case of atiflash use -f option)
6) after flashing is done, quickly switch off computer, remove the card, remove all wires you used to short pins
7) enjoy

which is 8GB/s upstream and 8GB/s downstream. It isn’t bottleneck in current game’s developing paradigm because it was created to workaround that bottleneck in ages of pci-e 1.1 or even agp. Just compare 2gb of vram on 6970 and 256mb vram on ps3. Cell cpu in ps3 can quickly feed gpu with needed data without the need to store everything in vram to keep up with fps. On pc, for sake of speed you gonna store as much as possible in gpu’s vram. (Yeah, I understand the difference in the output resolution, but still..)

But, next generation of pc gonna fix that, there is already a lot of pci-e 3.0 mainboards you can see on computex these days. Its gonna be released when sandybridge-E and ivybridge will be launched.

Pci-e 3.0 gonna give us 16 GB/s downstream and 16 GB/s upstream, which is now comparable to ps3.

I just wonder what game developers can do if they will not care about backward compatibility and will fully use that 32 GB/s (total bandwidth) line.